


day 1055

by lulla_lunekjaer



Series: birthdays mean something different in space [2]
Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Angst, Canonical Character Death, Gen, aka five birthdays maxwell celebrated (sort of) and one jacobi does (sort of), you know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-14
Updated: 2018-04-14
Packaged: 2019-04-22 04:50:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14301168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lulla_lunekjaer/pseuds/lulla_lunekjaer
Summary: April 13thDr. Alana Maxwell quietly turns a year older.plus, superstitions, emancipation, a shattered fake ID to avoid clubbing, an unwanted e-card, no silly hats before the contact event, and drinking alone.





	day 1055

**Author's Note:**

> "you should make this into a series and do one for each of their birthdays" - my sister
> 
> the dates in this are assumed based on the timeline on the w359 wiki and the extra material on www.wolf359.fm
> 
> also I wrote most of this while listening to Sky Full Of Song by Florence and the Machine and it's A+++

Friday, April 13th, 1990

On Alana Maxwell’s second birthday, her mother crossed herself took her daughter to church. Alana squirmed through the extra service, and she didn’t like the way the priest glared at her when he blessed her at her mother’s insistence.

“There were thirteen people at the Last Supper,” her mother whispered “and that was a Friday.” Alana didn’t understand. She was going to grow up to be brilliant, but she would never quite manage the art of communicating with humans. She was also two years old.

There was cake the next day, but it wasn’t particularly memorable, and Alana wouldn’t remember it. Her mother calculated the dates for the next ten years in advance and sighed with relief.

Tuesday, April 13th, 2004

On her sixteenth birthday, Alana Maxwell filed for emancipated minorship. She had been accepted to MIT for the fall and with her IT job at the new hotel, she could support herself until then. She quietly paid her college deposit and hoped the emancipation would go through before the end of August, when she had to be in Boston. Then nothing would be able to stop her.

Thursday, April 13th, 2006

For her birthday, Alana’s roommate gave her a fake ID.

“You’re eighteen, you’re legal, you’ll be a junior next year and people will assume you’re old enough to drink.” Her roommate shrugged. “You might as well not get caught.”

Alana took it and put it in her bag, at just the angle that the next time she threw her Advanced AI Comp textbook in it would be bent wrong and shatter.

She prefered self-destructive habits that don’t directly affect her brain, thanks, and she needed the excuse to stay it and read the latest articles on AI development and potential rather than go out clubbing anyway.

She switched roommates again for the fall semester and graduated in the spring.

 

(Alana Maxwell missed her twenty-fourth birthday because she was putting the finishing touches on her dissertation. She didn't even realize until two weeks had passed. It was worth it when she heard them call her “Doctor” for the first time.)

 

Sunday, April 13th, 2014

For her birthday, Jacobi sent Maxwell a terrible e-card.

“First,” she told him, “those are so old. I think Methuselah sent e-cards.”

“Second, the animation is terrible. And the sequencing is a new terror upon mankind. I could write a better code in an hour.”

“Third, I never told you when my birthday was.”

He gave her a shit-eating grin and patted her on the back.

“Human resources.”

Wednesday, April 13th, 2016

Maxwell quietly turned twenty-eight in space.

There were no candles, not on a space station. No cake, no silly hats, no time off. Birthdays do not stop the contact event from inching ever closer.

Hera woke her with a quiet “Happy Birthday, Dr. Maxwell,” and Maxwell smiled politely up at her camera.

“Thank you, Hera.”

Jacobi looked up when she entered the hanger bay. “Hey. I’m finishing up the interior sensors now, but it looks like the more delicate exterior ones are going to have to be installed once we get out there.”

Maxwell made a face. “But space suit gloves are so inelegant for that kind of work.”

Jacobi shrugged one shoulder.

“Fine, but you’re going to be the one installing them. I’m only the AI specialist, Mr. Ballistics-Include-Projectile-Modules.” Maxwell headed inside the module to start syncing the onboard computer with the sensors.

“Hey, Maxwell?” Jacobi said.

She turned and leaded back out, her hair floating around her head like a halo.

“Happy Birthday.”

A grin spread across Maxwell’s face.

“Thanks.”

Friday, April 13th, 2018

Daniel Jacobi thinks Maxwell would have appreciated the horror her mother would have felt on the date. Friday the Thirteenth. He wonders if Maxwell’s mother even knows she’s dead, if she kept up with the news, if anyone thought to notify her out in the middle of nowhere, Montana. He wonders about the restraining order.

Jacobi takes another sip of his drink. Not whiskey. It’s never whiskey anymore. In the end, it’s all expendable, just like she was.

The bar is far away from Philipsburg and Boston and Canaveral and all the other places he had ever known her. It’s far away from the one that started it all, the one that led him to her. It’s just as seedy as that one, though, and just as sad. This time he’s drinking even more alone, because he had his chance and he lost it. He lost her.

She was so, so brilliant, he thinks. She had so much more to do.

And because it’s never far from him mind anymore, he thinks about space. Maxwell would have put it in terms of computers or AIs or binary or all three, but all he knows is combustion.

A massive enough binary star will become a red giant and its neighboring white dwarf star will absorb enough mass from it to pass the Chandrasekhar limit and collapse before it explodes in a supernova, destroying both stars.

Maxwell, he thinks, was his red giant. She was so bright, so much of his life, and he thought their twin orbits would go on forever. Now he can only hope he absorbed enough of her to keep on going before something else in his life inevitably explodes. He finishes the not-whiskey and bangs the glass down on the table.

“Two of whatever shot’s the most expensive. Put it on my tab,” he says to the bartender. Some things can’t be trained out. The bartender hesitates, but he brings them.

Jacobi knocks one back and wipes his mouth on his hand. The other he slides over to the empty seat beside him.

“Happy birthday, Alana,” he whispers. She would have been thirty years old.

**Author's Note:**

> you can find me @mizeliza on tumblr


End file.
